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# Irritating Google Docs is irritating
- URL: https://balaustine.mymagic.page/irritating-google-docs-is-irritating/
- Published: 2023-07-21T09:15:52.000Z
- Updated: 2023-07-21T09:15:52.000Z
- Author: VM
- Tags: Life notes, Tech, Google Bard, Google Docs, Grammarly, homeopathy, spell check, #Migrated-1787484114599, #wp, #wp-post, #Import 2026-08-23 11:22

The backdrop of the shenanigans of ChatGPT, Bard and other artificial intelligence (AI) systems these days has only served to accentuate how increasingly frustrating working with Google Docs is. I use Docs every day to write my articles and edit those that the freelancers I'm working with have filed. I don't use tools like Grammarly but I do pay attention Docs's blue and red underlines indicating grammatical and typographical aberrations, respectively. And what Docs chooses to underline either way is terribly inconsistent. I have [written previously](https://theparticlehorizon.wordpress.com/2020/01/14/google-docs-a-new-hope/?ref=balaustine.mymagic.page) on how Docs 'learns' grammar, based on each user's style, and expressed concern that its learning agent could be led astray by a large number of people, such as Indians, using English differently from the rest of the world and thus biasing it. Fortunately this issue doesn't seem to have come to pass – but the agent has continued to be completely non-smart in a more fundamental way. This morning, I was editing an article about homeopathy on Docs and found that it couldn't understand that "homeopathy", "homeopathic", and "Homeopathy" are just different forms of the same root word. As a result, correcting "homoeopathy" to "homeopathy" didn't suffice; you have to correct *each form* to remove the additional 'o'.

![](https://gravitysshadow.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/2c666-4480c-screenshot-2023-07-21-at-8.55.09-am.png?w=1024&h=624)

It gets worse: the same word in bold is, according to Google Docs, a different word…

![](https://gravitysshadow.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/f5f8e-31f73-screenshot-2023-07-21-at-8.55.28-am.png?w=1024&h=212)

… as is the word with a small 'H'.

![](https://gravitysshadow.files.wordpress.com/2024/03/89b22-70350-screenshot-2023-07-21-at-9.08.57-am.png?w=1024&h=290)

Google has a reputation for having its fingers in too many pies and as a result neglecting improvements in one pie because it's too busy focusing on another. There is also a large [graveyard of Google products](https://killedbygoogle.com/?ref=balaustine.mymagic.page) that have been killed off as a result. There's some reason, for now, to believe Docs won't meet the same fate but then again I don't know how to explain the persistence of such an easily fixable problem.